Max Apple

• Born: October 22, 1941
• Birthplace: Grand Rapids, Michigan

Other literary forms

In addition to writing some critical articles and to editing a book on the fiction of the Southwest, Max Apple has written two novels, Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right (1978) and The Propheteers: A Novel (1987), and two memoirs, Roommates: My Grandfather’s Story (1994) and I Love Gootie: My Grandmother’s Story (1998). He was a contributor to Liquid City: Houston Writers on Houston (1987), a nonfiction work celebrating the Houston International Festival. In addition to writing novels and short stories, Apple has written a number of screenplays: Smokey Bites the Dust (1981), The Air Up There (1994), and Roommates (1995; an adaptation of his 1994 memoir).

Achievements

In 1971, Max Apple received the National Endowment for the Humanities younger humanist’s fellowship; he has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. The Oranging of America, and Other Stories earned him the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 1976, as did Free Agents in 1985. He won Hadassah magazine’s Ribalous Award for the best Jewish fiction of 1985. Apple has also contributed stories to a number of periodicals. Five of his books have been recognized as New York Times Notable Books. Apple’s essay “The American Bakery” was selected by The New York Times as one of the best to appear in the first one hundred years of the Book Review. In 2010, he won a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Biography

Max Isaac Apple was born October 22, 1941, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Samuel Apple and Betty Goodstein. Max Apple married Talya Fishman, and together they reared four children (two from a previous marriage): Jessica, Sam, Elisheva, and Leah. Apple received a B.A. in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of Michigan. He did postgraduate study at Stanford University.

Following his graduation, Apple worked as an assistant professor of literature and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1972, he accepted an appointment at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he was assistant professor from 1972 to 1976, associate professor from 1976 to 1980, and professor of English beginning in 1980. After teaching at Rice University for twenty-nine years he retired briefly, but he later resumed teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served on the faculty with his son, Sam.

Growing up in a three-generation Jewish household, in which a respect for language and an appreciation of humor and style in language were the norm, Apple naturally gravitated toward the idea of telling stories. During the early 1970’s, Apple contributed to a study of Nathanael West edited by David Madden, Nathanael West: The Cheaters and the Cheated (1972), and to the journal Studies in English. In 1976, Apple gained recognition as a writer with The Oranging of America, and Other Stories.

Analysis

Max Apple’s early background no doubt helped to shape his literary career. Acquiring English as a second language after growing up in a Yiddish-speaking home contributed to his viewing mainstream American life as an outsider before becoming a part of that current; thus, he could recast his American life experience in terms that are simultaneously realistic and fantastic. By taking the perspective of the perpetual outsider, Apple has remained amazed at daily life in a way that he believes most people cannot.

Throughout his work, Apple develops at least four major themes or issues. He explores the intensity with which Americans expend their energy on pursuing the new, the hitherto unheard of; his writing traces how this restless yearning for the untried is connected to a basic need for safety and for immortality. He also searches for some middle ground between the ideal of the American Dream and the reality of it, aware all along of the impossibility of fulfilling that dream. Likewise, Apple addresses the ambiguity inherent in American enterprise. He perceives it partly as the pitch of a con artist to a gullible client and partly as a dreamer’s response to genuine human need and desire. It is the mythic impulse of Americans to enlarge, improve, and keep moving, as opposed to the results of this impulse, that Apple sees as the focus for most Americans.

Whether developed consciously or not, a number of techniques characterize his work. Many of his stories are peopled with well-known public figures, such as Howard Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover. This technique serves as a shortcut by calling up an image of the person in the reader’s mind, making long, detailed descriptions unnecessary and leaving Apple free to make the figure into something that is all his own. He deals with what he believes is more real about them than their physical reality: their status in readers’ collective imagination. Another shortcut employed is compression. Apple has cited a line from the story “Inside Norman Mailer” as an example: Following a description of prizefighting, he simply says, “You’ve all seen it—imagine it yourself!” He is thus spared the task of writing pages of description, when it is only the metaphor in which he is interested.

Apple sometimes recalls an early, minor event or thing from his childhood—for example, a gasoline station—and merges that memory with other, more fantastic material. Rhythm is a basic stylistic feature of his work. Whether a sentence is accurate is not nearly as important as whether the sentence sounds right, and, unlike many other writers, he is not concerned with a formal unity in his stories.

Though not all of Apple’s stories deal with the Jewish experience, elements of Judaism and Jewish culture appear commonly in his writings. Apple frequently appeals to both the Jewish and the immigrant experience in constructing stories of social outsiders and those who somehow feel out of place among the rhythm of a lifestyle that seems to be occurring around them but separate from them. While many of his stories contain hints of social satire or cultural criticism, these themes are muted against Apple’s deep compassion for characters who struggle to navigate the current of a slightly mystifying lifestyle, one in which they do not feel wholly included.

There is no thread of anger running through Apple’s stories; his wit is tender and soft-edged. In his voice is almost an affection, as if he were admonishing a beloved family member with a gentle patience or even amusement. He welcomes diversity and tension for their own sake. Cultural clichés are transformed into shining gems. By polishing the cultural rubble of American life, he rejuvenates our spirits. His stories are basically optimistic. His stories find a place among others that examine the American Dream.

“The Oranging of America”

This title story of his 1976 collection demonstrates Apple’s overtly fictive strategy. The oranging is that of the rooftops of Howard Johnson motels; he credits the poet Robert Frost as the source of inspiration for making them orange. Johnson, his secretary Millie, and Otis, a former busboy, feel a tingling when they come to a spot where people need to stop and rest; this is how Johnson chooses building sites for new motels. Combining his startling imagination with originality, wit, and economy, Johnson does most of his business in a Cadillac limousine equipped with an ice-cream freezer that produces twenty-eight flavors, though Johnson eats only vanilla. Years later, when Millie becomes ill, she investigates having her body frozen after death, and in order to make it possible for Millie to continue traveling with him, Johnson has the steel capsule from the Cryonic Society installed in a U-Haul trailer attached to the Cadillac.

“Selling Out”

Although the fantastic element is present, this story is basically plausible. The narrator inherits some money, and when his stockbroker cousin is unsuccessful in turning a satisfactory profit from it, he studies the market himself, sells what he has, and successfully reinvests the money based on his own studies. Like all the stories in The Oranging of America, and Other Stories, “Selling Out” is concerned with big-money action in the capitalist system. Apple lives up to his reputation for comic intelligence as he mimics American economics with a tender, insidious wit.

“Walt and Will”

Taking the two well-known Disney brothers of cartoon and amusement park fame, Apple uses them for his own purposes. Walt is fixated on motion, which later becomes the principle behind his genius for animation. He is as intensely absorbed in studying the way ants move as any scientist would be in history-making research, for he wants to duplicate the mechanics of animation that he sees in the natural world. His imagination opens to the possibilities of animating great works of art. After the animated Mickey Mouse is born, it is Will, the practical but visionary brother, who goads Walt into developing Walt Disney World in Florida; with the California Disneyland, their enterprise would be “like a belt around the country,” and America would have her own national monuments, as Europe has. Walt, however, is entranced not with buildings and huge business deals but with movement, with films. Fantasy, reality, absurdity, and seriousness often merge in Apple’s version of the making of the Mickey Mouse Empire.

“Free Agents”

This hilarious fantasy features Apple’s internal organs striking for autonomy, insisting that they should have the right to decide where, if ever, they are to be transplanted. His stomach is the narrator of the story. The organs go before a judge, the pituitary gland, who rules that, after a May 11 deadline, all organs, muscles, and tissues, whether Apple’s original organs or some added after his birth, will become free agents. As such, they will be able to negotiate with any available bodies. In mock seriousness, the sentence is declared a fair one, made in the spirit of democratic fairness that has characterized the history of collective bargaining. Again, in typical fashion, Apple targets economic, social, and moral issues behind the mask of fantasy and malice-free humor.

“The Jew of Home Depot”

The title story of Apple’s first collection in more than two decades tells the story of eighty-year-old Jerome Baumgarten, who is dying surrounded by gentiles and who is looking for a family of “real Jews” to accompany him as he moves toward death. The Chabad Lubavitcher family of Reb Avram Hirsch, with his son and daughters, comes to Marshall, Texas, to live in Baumgarten’s home and guide him into Jewish living, just as he is preparing to depart from the world. As Baumgarten enters the lives of the Hirsch family, so, too, does the influence of the gentiles’ lifestyle. Separated from the insulated Crown Heights community to which they are accustomed, the Hirsch family must grapple with matters of faith and self-sufficiency, as they struggle to fill a dying man’s final wish without compromising their own lives. Apple treats the resulting cultural clashes with sympathy and without judgment, as his characters open literal and metaphorical doors to discourse and new experiences.

Bibliography

Bellamy, Joe David. Literary Luxuries: American Writing at the End of the Millennium. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. A record of Bellamy’s search for a literary life, this book examines various facets of the literary scene in the late twentieth century. A section called “Contemporaries” provides brief overviews of sixteen writers, including Max Apple, whom Bellamy admires for the way he shows that “the spirit that made America what it is today is still operative” in such fictionalized figures as Howard Johnson in “The Oranging of America” and for his mellowness, which is described as an unusual quality of affection and a certain nostalgia that he generates while at the same time making his characters the butts of his ridicule. While Apple creates fabulous fantasies, few laws of nature are suspended, making his stories strangely plausible. The book lauds Apple’s formal economy, balance, and purposefulness of action and plot and concludes that his whimsicality and imaginative bravado are rarely forced.

Bennett, Patrick. Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews. College Station: Texas A and M University Press, 1980. In this interview with Apple, which is included along with those of eleven other Texas writers, he shares how he became a writer and describes some of his writing habits: writing in longhand, not preparing an outline, not devoting a set number of hours or words per day to writing. In the interview, Apple explains that his use of real names of fictionalized characters helps to bring his voice into the real world and identifies himself as a comic writer who looks for irony but who does not strive for a “punch line.”

Chénetier, Marc. Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction Since 1960. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. While relevant references to Apple are made throughout the book, Chénetier focuses extensively on Apple in two chapters. “Cultural Tradition and the Present” finds that Apple devotes the core of his work to using glaring symbols, such as the orange roofs of Howard Johnson motels, to draw a line between the powers of myth and its “puny incarnations.” The article also identifies Apple’s ability to recycle materials, which some might deem unusable in literary writing, and to approach them in a fresh way. Another chapter deals with voice in writing. The author uses one of Apple’s analogies, the ventriloquist who has a dummy: for Apple, the dummy is the fiction, the part of himself that gets the best lines, while he is the straight man who provides the tension that he desires in his sentences.

Hodgman, Ann. "Surrounded by Gentiles." The New York Times, 20 Jan. 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Hodgman-t.html. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017.

Hume, Kathryn. “Diffused Satire in Contemporary American Fiction.” Modern Philology 105, no. 2 (2007): 300-325. Hume’s article addresses Apple’s use of literary tone in his novel The Propheteers. Drawing comparisons between Apple’s novel and other contemporary works, including Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon (1997) and Robert Coover’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut (2002), Hume addresses samples of vastly differing modern American fiction in the context of general theories of satire and specifically of diffused satire. Though the article does not delve into Apple’s short fiction, the themes and literary devices explored within offer insight into Apple’s broader body of work.

Lanham, Fritz. "Author Max Apple Returns After Long Absence." The Houston Chronicle, 29 Oct. 2007,www.chron.com/life/books/article/Author-Max-Apple-returns-after-long-absence-1811693.php. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017.

McCaffrey, Larry, and Linda Gregory. Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1990’s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Apple is one of thirteen writers interviewed. Apple explains his sense of realism as being “the way the world is,” and cites Gabriel García Márquez’s writing as an example of realistic fiction. He prefers fantasy, parody, and myth to more conventional forms. Choosing the short story over the novel as a means of expression is a matter of not having time for the longer genre. Other characteristics of his work that are discussed include his interest in what his characters’ names represent, not in the persons themselves; in fact, he does not research these characters—Howard Johnson or Walt Disney, for example. He admits a decided preference for story writing to writing academic papers.

Rubin, Derek. Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. This lively collection includes Apple’s essay “Max and Mottele,” in which the author addresses his struggles with identity and how these personal struggles have paved the way for his characters’ existence in the space between two cultures. This essay also provides insight into the writer and his career, as well as his choices to employ or depart from his own background in crafting his stories.

Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub. Contemporary Jewish American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Apple is one of sixty-three Jewish American writers discussed; each entry includes biographical data as well as major works and themes. A final section traces each writer’s development and emerging critical reception. Primary and secondary bibliographies are provided for each writer.

Wilde, Alan. “Dayanu: Max Apple and the Ethics of Sufficiency.” Contemporary Literature 26, no. 3 (1985): 254. This article critiques Apple’s literary writings, with particular attention to the stories of Free Agents and the writer’s approach to concepts of the aesthetic and of psychological order. Themes of adaptation of the ethics of sufficiency, as addressed in this article, pertain more broadly to many of Apple’s short stories and other literary works.